La Dichiarazione dei diritti di Rigas Velestinlìs

This essay concerns the Declaration of Rights by Rigas Velestinlìs, one of the most important personalities of Greek Enlightenment. First of all, the article tries to explain some important aspects of his biography. He was born in 1757 in Velestino, a little village in Thessaly; he then lived in Istambul, Bucarest and Vienna, and he died prisoner in Belgrade in 1798, after he was given in charge by Austrian police to Turkish authorities for his revolutionary plan. The Declaration of Rights is an important part of his revolutionary vision for the Balkans, and the central subject of this essay, so, is an analysis of this text in a comparative perspective with the French Montagnard Constitution of 1793, that was its main source. Two issues are especially developed in this paper. First, the Declaration by Rigas Velestinlìs tries to explain and exemplify the content of the French Constitution in a more concrete way; the goal of Rigas is to educate Greek people to the grammar of freedom, translating main concepts of the Enlightenment and revolutionary culture in the Balkan context. For achieving this goal, so, the meaning of articles of the French Declaration somewhat change in his translation: for instance, the Greek text asserts that men and women have the same right to enjoy a public system of education. Second, Rigas tries to adapt the national French example to a multinational and multireligious empire like the Ottoman state. Finally, the Declaration by Rigas Velestinlìs is an interesting case of translation of cultural ideas and paradigms in different contexts of late XVIIIth century Europe.